This is a performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony
that one might be very pleased to encounter in the concert hall, although
probably not in what sounds on this recording like the cramped and rather
acoustically dead Smolarz Auditorium. The notes are all there, in the right
place and in the right balance, and Kurt Masur handles the score with accuracy
and aplomb if without much sense of Dionysian revelry. In truth, though,
one cannot really understand why it was thought that this performance was
worth preserving on disc.

It is perhaps unfortunate for modern interpreters of Beethoven that there
are so many great performances from the past still available on CD in sound
that still sounds excellent. Forty or fifty years ago a new recording could
be expected to justify its place in the catalogue because it probably sounded
better than a recording made ten years before, even if the performance was
not a match for Toscanini or Furtwängler or whoever. This can no longer
be said, and a home listener nowadays can be well satisfied with Carlos
Kleiber, Herbert von Karajan, Simon Rattle, Otto Klemperer or another luminary
of the past. Neither the performance nor the recording here will match that.
Indeed the recording itself, with the winds and brass rather close to the
microphones and some distant audience coughs during the Allegretto,
does not match those earlier versions.

Maybe the coupling, a recording of Beethoven’s relatively unfamiliar incidental
music to Goethe’s Egmont, will tip the balance? Well, no. In the
first place, it is not quite complete. We have the Overture and all the
other purely musical numbers which Beethoven wrote for the theatre, but
the melodrama Süsse Schlaf is missing. Someone clearly forgot to
tell Benjamin Perl, who wrote the booklet notes for Egmont in this
issue, and he is allowed to say: “The climax of the music comes now. Against
an orchestral background, like the accompaniment to a recitative, Egmont
prays for sleep to ease his last hours before his execution…The music aptly
depicts his vision, the essence of the entire play.” Unfortunately the listener
is unable to judge the accuracy of these words, since the music in question
has been omitted. Sharon Rostorf-Zamir is a boisterous but rather unsteady
Clärchen, and the booklet does not give us the words of her two songs. Back
in 1972 Georg Szell engaged a narrator to speak the role of Egmont for his
Vienna recording, and although the ranting of Klausjürgen Wussow in his
final scene brings uncomfortable overtones of Hitlerian speeches, it does
give the effect that Goethe and Beethoven wanted. Here the closing Victory
Symphony simple charges in immediately after Clärchen’s death, with
an effect that it is both abrupt and unmotivated.

Even Masur fans will presumably already have his earlier recording of the
Seventh Symphony with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra made in
the 1970s, which is just as well played as this and even better recorded
(in early quadraphonic sound); it is currently available as a Pentatone
reissue. Masur also recorded Egmont, with Sylvia McNair as Clärchen
and Will Quadflieg as narrator, at a live New York Philharmonic concert
in 1992 and that is available cheaply coupled with the Fifth Symphony
on Warner Apex - although – given that company’s approach to presentation
– presumably without any texts or booklet notes at all.

No, I am sorry to say this disc is a decidedly unnecessary addition to the
catalogue.